by Sandra Huber

The story I am about to tell you is no story at all but rather a memory and the only one of its kind. Twice before this memory begins I repeat the name Montgomery Percy Plantagenet and three times after this memory has been lifted and placed in the dirt I will say the name again. It becomes like a tongue twister: twice for the name's sake and thrice for good luck. Although I have not yet found out if Luck is in fact called by that name for she seldom seems to answer to it, much like me to my own. I know who I am even without a Montgomery you see, from my red shoes to my red bowtie down to the bandaid on my small toe and up again to the hair on my head, now slicked down by last night's lightstorm and black like nothing else. This is me and you are you and you can see already that there is no use in being strangers. So let me begin.

In your school perhaps it is different, but in mine we are all made to wear uniforms colour-coded by age:  yellow for grade two, blue is grade three, and I wear a red uniform that says I'm in grade four. Since our town is so small, we are all of us piled into one school which they have decided to locate an incredibly long way from my house. You'd think I would mind but I don't, for as long as I can remember my sister Alphonse and I have walked every morning together to the nearest bus-stop located on Ashby and Third, me in my red uniform and she in her violet one for grade nine. Tell me a story Alphonse, I'll say to her and she'll ask me to pick a number and I will and she'll tell me the story that goes with it and the stories are different each time even if I've picked the same number twice. Story Twelve is only Story Twelve once, she says, until it counts as something else and changes. Then she’ll begin her telling, off the top of her head as they say, and you wouldn’t believe it but the story she tells falls down around us like shadows fall from trees on the dirt road.

Today Story Twelve is of a great whirlwind of fire and smoke that has melted the icebergs of the arctic into the sea and sizzled all the windows out of the homes in the West. Oh no, I say, I'll pick another number, but Alphonse stops me and laughs. It's a good thing Monty, because the whirlwind makes fissures in the earth that lead down into other worlds deep inside the earth that have been hidden from us 'til now. Do the people with the broken windows go down there? I ask her. Of course, she says, and once they're there they find all the windows they could ever desire, all intact and clear and beautiful and looking on into such wheels and pillars of fire as no window ever has before.

We are happy this way. Me and Alphonse Alphonse and me. There is the road on our left with its tufts of grass and petals, there is the river we follow to the right, rinsing the rocks beneath in folds of water more crisp and smooth and green than Grandmother's pea soup. The sky, whether blue or crayoned in smears of grey looks down upon our criss-cross fingers, swinging arms. Walking this route from the beginning of time, and maybe even before the beginning if you like to count. Which I do and often.

There are six letters in a Monday. M 2 3 D 5 6, and I’m not quite sure if it’s because of the number or the name of it that Alphonse lets go of my hand on this particular one. We have only just descended the bus in front of our school and there are the two hands of Alphonse and here are the two hands of mine and none of them are joined. I look down at my empty palms and up into the face of my sister that’s grown distant and whimsical and I know now that something curious is about to happen.

You’re old enough to walk to your class by yourself Monty, she says and grins and winks and slips into a puff of violet girls who dullen in every detail that makes up my sister, every small lump of hair bumping its blue-black way back to a violet hair-tie. Every crack on her bowed chapped mouth. And before I can even count to one one hundred two, she turns from the violet girls and her whole turning body is an open stare and I cannot help (and neither could you if you were here) but look to where Alphonse looks and see:

The Girl,

with the Birthmark,

        who enters the puff (like it is any puff), who embraces my sister in a way that makes the others turn and whisper and scatter. She’s foreign, the hugging girl, I know about her and she doesn’t belong in this country altogether, nevermind our very own town. Moved here only a few months ago with no mother and a father who speaks funny like she does. Live atop their furniture store they do, like birds, not in a proper house with a proper river out back. I look to her nails, every second one painted in black and I shiver for she gives me this feeling of missing pieces. Alphonse. I remember our attic, clovers in May, for this is my good thought. I put my hands in my pockets and walk slowly to my doom: Miss. Ivory and her brown stockinged history lessons. Who cares about Sultans and Queens and Dukes, I think, when it is Alphonse she is taking away.

Everybody has to like something and my sister Alphonse Penelope likes to watch windows. Especially when it is raining and especially when it is windy and raining and grey and turning worse. Today when we arrive home from school Alphonse goes straight to the window for the weather has been worsening since Saturday and she has been taken by fierce anticipation. Her fingernails are bitten down almost to the skin and I wonder what mischief they have caused to make her attack them so.

What are you doing, I ask, sitting beside her in a crook of bay window.

I’m watching, she says.

Her lips are chapped red as my uniform.

What are you watching?

Storms.

There’s no storms, only dark sky, I say and touch my hand to the cold translucence: pale, glassy. What is a window and who does it watch?

There’s one coming by my calculations and I won’t miss it, Montgomery. It is not good to miss storms. We can learn from them.

Pause. Chew.

Which storm is this one, Alphonse?

A light storm. Powerful lightning. You know lightning, Monty, remember? When you were very little and we saw a light that took away all the darkness. That’s what you said, "it takes away all the dark," and we went to Grandmother then, remember Monty? We went to Grandmother and told her there’s a light in the hallway.

And what did she say?

She said, There’s Light In Your Bedrooms Too. Now Get On Upstairs And Into Your Pajamas.

I laugh because I do not remember but Alphonse does remember she remembers

well I see it in her eyes. And when you’re Alphonse and you remember well you don’t laugh very much. She counts on her fingers, looks into the glass and lists,

Ribbon lightning. Dark lightning, horizontal, meandering and rocket lightning, silent lightning, bead lightning, Te Lapa or underwater lightning, tubular lightning,

and I sit with her for as long as she stays. Up until there is a knock at the back door.

I know that the Monday has six letters but I do not know how the Mondays are with you. Here they are always creeping, full, allergic. Mondays are the weekly equivalent of the church’s Brown Scapular: itchy to the point of being painful, a necessary piety to make up for any of the week’s joy. Or so Grandmother says. It is on this particular Monday that the girl Lucy enters our home. Lucy in violet, Lucy in the sky, Lucy in through the back door and sitting at the kitchen table. I look at Lucy through the slits in my fingers, expecting a collision, but Grandmother simply says, Hello Dear, and, Welcome To Our Home. We Hadn’t Expected Visitors But I’m Sure We’d Be Delighted To Have You As Our Guest, Wouldn’t We Montgomery? I crinkle my eyebrows. The fact is that we never expect visitors for we have not yet had one. I was not even aware that visitors were something to be had, for that matter, but here I am and there is Grandmother and over there Alphonse and yet everyone seems alien in the light of Lucy, smiling impish-like in her violet grade nine uniform, two lines of safety pins drawn up and down both sides of her body from socks to collar, mousy hair frizzing out into new dimensions. Who is having who, I wonder.

At the dinner table I sit on the green stool, usually used as a seat for the aloe-vera plant. Even though Grandmother often calls me The Little Man Of The House, I have been placed on the stool for the fact that we have only three chairs and I imagine Lucy Sunday would not like to sit on the floor. Up here I am taller than everyone else and I watch them all as if I am the spirit of an ancestor observing the going-ons of my living lineage. I say little and eat barely anything, imagining a golden sceptre in my hand that I touch to each person’s shoulder, making them glow, allowing them to speak. Though after a few minutes I begin to lose control of who to tap next and which side to look on now because the people below move only from polite to polite, and I wonder what proper ghost has hijacked the skin of Grandmother, making her mouth move in such niceties. Lucy looks at me, looks at my plate, looks at the aloe-vera plant beside me on the floor.

Your spaceship is brown, she says. Sometime I will show you a real spaceship if you would like. All mine are very colourful.

I blink three times and look down into my plate. I have made a UFO with my roast beef and gravy, hoping that it would take me, Alphonse and perhaps the aloe-vera plant back to its planet for the rest of the evening.

Lucy is invited for a sleep over and I can hear her and my sister on the other side of the wall laughing and whispering. I count my fingers: ten. I say the name: Montgomery, in the voice of Pete the cat who lies at my feet. I do the nightly check of my room, looking first to each of the four corners. Clear. Looking second to each of the four walls. Clear. Looking third to Pete the cat. Sleeping. I then shake out my hair, check under the bed, and pull the covers over my head. My flashlight turns on and I begin to think in its light. What is a word that rhymes with Lucy. I will bury it in the earth tomorrow; she will be gone by Wednesday.

I shine my flashlight, now upon the wall, now upon the ceiling, and begin to count the cracks I see there; hundreds upon hundreds of thin, branching cracks like an eggshell has when you drop it on the kitchen floor beside the fridge. I click off the light and the giggles of Alphonse and Lucy fade around me as I fall into dreams of crawling. Through an underground fort, looking, looking, looking, for what? One onehundred, two onehundred, three onehundred, four. Dirt surrounding me like hands, I find it. A piece of cloth, torn from an old blanket I had as an infant. Only now it smells of tweed, is violet in colour.

The next morning is Tuesday and Tuesday is a good day for words. I wake up to a light in the sky and I think morning only it’s too dim and quiet to be morning so I think almost morning and that is a perfect time for returning Lucy to the earth before I have to get ready for school. Lucy Lucy I have rolled around in my mouth until the name has become creamy and thick, ready to be written out properly and put down to rest. I dress carefully in my red uniform, quickly wiping away lint and old smudges for it is essential that I be tidy. Quickly, quickly, I must do this quickly or I just won’t at all. There is not much time. I count to three and touch my thumb to each of my fingernails, making a total count of thirteen beats while walking the hallway from my room to my sister’s. The floor here smells of fresh lemon from Grandmother’s late night clean, and as I see my foot-step enter a triangle of light I hope dearly that the floorboards will not crack from the mixture of light and foot like my own Bird Bones will one day, as Grandmother often reminds me. And even at the thought of this I have the small shiver: for if I have bones of a bird, will not Pete one day want to lick them clean?

The door to my sister’s room opens quietly and as quickly as the door to her wardrobe. There is the uniform: hanging in violet, smeared in blue light by the night light she keeps by the door. It will only be a little section Alphonse, that is all I need, just a small piece. I have decided to use the Swiss Army knife Grandmother bought me for Christmas last year, and I unfold the unused blade like a birthday package, snipping off a teensy cube of violet tweed from the folded over hem of the pleated skirt. It doesn’t hurt, Alphonse, just a wee scar. As I leave the room I brush past my sister’s bed so that I can see her face peering out in sleep from the big blue quilt. Only what makes itself in my sight is not her face at all; this one is much too writhing with freckles, has a rumpled birthmark spreading over the entire left eyelid. I feel a chill as if a curse is being sent out from Lucy’s breath pattern, and stay clear of the bed as I leave the room. What has she done with Alphonse, I wonder. Sliding down the stairs, grimaces follow me on all angles, sharp whispers slither down the walls like hand puppets, lemon goblins whose voices are known to shave off angles from the body extremities. Away and away, I say, until I am out the back door, feeling the violet fabric rolled in my wet palm. I have never been vexed like this before, the taste of sulfur and salt, my throat tightening elastic above my shoulders. She was in your bed, Alphonse, instead of yourself. Sleeping there like nothing in the world.

I reach the river. I take extra special care not to step on any of my previously buried words. I know where these words are, you see, like you know where your own words rest and besides, the blades of grass would not let me step where I have been digging even if I tried. They say it is not good manners. Their slender shoots bend beneath my footfalls with the heads of dandelions and spring up intact like underwater. The sky above the grass and the dandelions and myself threatens to hug its fat grey clouds into all of us, and only sprigs of sunshine are allowed to pass down onto the damp earthbed leading into the river, and further onto the face of the river which scrunches into ripples so slight they look more like waves from a diorama in Friday arts and crafts class. The morning light is pale and makes my eyes small.

The sky is missing in Story Ninety-four, said Alphonse and I shook my head. I don’t believe you, I said, and she pointed up to the attic ceiling which looked like it would cave in at any moment. Lopsided rafters, not to mention pink stuffing dipping out of plastic wrap. She continued. The sky is gone (I nodded my head) and the people beneath it have stretched out thin and loose like cooked linguine noodles. Above the swamplands, below the treetops, the corpse lights come out, the will o’ the wisps and ghost lights. What’s the difference between wisps and corpse ghosts? Corpse lights, will o’ the wisps and ghost lights, Mont. Fairytales are the difference I suppose. But in the eyes of science they’re all lights that rise up from the water in bubbles or flames or maybe strings that look like faces and bodies but aren’t. In Ninety-four nothing ends anymore, she said, and everwhere is crowded and long, and sticks and cakes and elbows and jumpsuits and things are no longer separate but eachother now, and the linguine people crowd toward the fireships in neat line-ups. They’ll set sail. At those words, her arm swept out across the air in an arc that gestured toward ten hundred fire ships, lemon ghosts and lightning willows, all full of ripe tomatoes. I saw them. Her face smiled.

As I hop about finding the proper place for a new hole I think of the maze of other holes beneath the ground (tucked under the earth like glow worms), and how there might by now be as many of them as there are rooms in our house. Rooms leading to attics leading to other rooms and each so crisp and bare as the space between a rhyme and the word it cheats off. Pete is waiting by the riverbed, silent, his white paws fishing in the water, but he is up soon enough and beside me as I begin to dig. Close so close to the edge of river this time, for water can help you when you feel up against a powerful force such as Lucy Sunday.

Ride away, ride away, Johnny shall ride, and he shall have pussycat tied to one side; And he shall have...Alphonse! tied to the other, And Johnny shall ride...

I claw out the earth with my own fingers and sing and Pete licks his fur like he does but he doesn’t join in my song for he cannot even make a cat noise nevermind a singing one.

I do not like thee, Doctor Fell; The reason why I cannot tell,
But this I know and know full well, I do not like thee, Doctor Fell!

When I have enough earth beside me and not so much in the hole, I take the pencil and the tweed from my pocket and close my eyes to write the word Goosee, so brilliant a rhyme that I feel tingles lifting from beneath my tongue as I smile. She will be gone, be gone by tomorrow. But it is then unfortunate, for the tweed takes it upon itself to slide from my hand as if by Lucy’s own breath and flees like a freckle into the river. No, and I’m reaching my fingers out full and splayed and I feel the tweed and I have the material only it’s soaked and as I lay it back into the hole I see my rhyme is ruined and one of the o’s smudged out. Go see, it says. It says Go see, and that does not rhyme with Lucy at all, and I throw the dirt over it, hiding it, and pick up Pete quickly, holding him to myself so that I can feel the speedy ticktock of his cat heart. We sit like this for some time, all close and cold and shocked still and the wind starts and some rain to top it all off. Pete’s tongue brushes my wrist and I hear his voice as if he is talking to me. We are one, and I respond. You are nine and a half years old. You walk to your bus-stop everyday on Ashby and Third. You are good you do your chores and return that to the earth which you have no use for. But your sister, she has a friend. Her name is Lucy.

And we do not like her.

It is Alphonse’s ashen face in the window as I approach the house. Pete skittles out of my arms and is away, a white ghost fleeing the rain, pattering so fast I lose count of his paw lifts as he disappears into the trees. The door is heavy and heaves with sighs as I open it into the house, remembering the hand puppet goblins I encountered on my way out. But it is the sight of my sister that grips me away from here and I go to sit beside her, catching my breath.

Monty, the river, don’t you remember the river when we were little?

Her face is catching itself in fire, her eyes flitter animatedly across the greying sky. There is something about her now, and I find this curious because of course I remember the river, was there only minutes ago. But Alphonse continues:

When we went down there to catch the light.

I’m silent. Light again. Alphonse puts her hand on the window beside mine and they appear stuck there like two mosquitoes in the breakfast butter.

Is this a story, Alphonse? Like Thirty or Sixty-five?

No Mont. This is a memory. There was that storm just beginning and it was my first storm that I can really remember, and I wondered if we would see a lightning like Grandmother said we might. So I took your hand and we went down the hall, towards the back door, to go out and see. And we did see, though without even leaving the house, for it was right there in our own hallway.

What was it Alphonse? Was it lightning?

We didn’t know what it was. Only that it was round, about the size of one of Pete’s wool balls and it fizzled and shone like a light bulb and seemed to be searching about the hall...

What was it looking for? Did it see us?

We tried to catch it. We went for it. But it scorched its way through the window and left behind about a million trillion cracks in the walls and ceilings like the walls had come alive and grown veins, Mont, I swear it looked just like that and then it was gone. Down by the river...

Alphonse, what was it?

Alphonse’s eyes are like to mine: black and wide and Mad With The Look as Grandmother says, only I don’t think mine glisten quite as hers do right now. If I tried, I could see all the way through to her memory, it is that kind of glisten, but I don’t because I don’t like the feeling I get when we see eachother that closely. Instead I look at her surface and I see these two bright black eyes and I try to remember on my own.

I didn’t know for the longest time what it was, she says, and her face falls sideways towards the window, contemplative as when she tries to tell me about the rules of arithmetic.

But I read about something like to it in New Scientist, Mont, at the school library, and there was a picture of it and a name beside it which read "Ball Lightning." And I thought, that’s funny, because it did look like a ball and it did look to be lightning and all, only it was seeing, Monty, I swear, I really do, that it was looking for something. You were only so small. But you knew, you knew what we had to do and we could communicate even then.

She takes her hand from the pane and puts it on the back of my neck, then up and through my hair and I close my eyes and start to see a picture of her though I try not to.

We went to chase it. There was so much wind and rain, but the light was clear as an ice cube and white like Grandmother’s dresses, only shiny. Lightning is "luminous," Monty. That’s what Ms. Turing said when I asked about it. And I remember, I wanted to have that luminous ball.

But weren’t we scared? To go and chase it?

No, Monty. We’re never scared, you and I.

I look at Alphonse and suck in my bottom lip. Sometimes I am scared, but I don’t want to disappoint her.

What else happened?

Nothing else. But I remember feeling like I should jump into the river then to catch it ’cause that’s where it went. The water looked so clear and I could see the rocks but you didn’t want to jump. Rather, you seemed sickened by the luminous ball. So we never did. It would have taken us upstream, we would’ve ended up somewhere else. Maybe even in Tuktoyaktuk or Scotland. And I always think, what would have happened if I had jumped in the river? With that light...

But she’s lost me here, for there’s a noise near to us and it has taken the form of Lucy Sunday who is now standing behind my sister, touching her hair and saying, Oh Alph I would go with you, in such a way that makes my skin tighten. We are all three connected here, you see, with Lucy’s hand on Alphonse and Alphonse’s hand on me and I feel my blood stopping stock still behind my eyes.

We are going to be late for school, I say.

I run up the stairs and in through the doorway of my bedroom and it is here that I have to stop myself and concentrate on my own hands, shaking a little, because I feel slightly mixed up now as to what is my actual body and what is the actual room around me that I see and what is in Alphonse’s memory that she has passed to me. And I still see with Alphonse’s eyes as I seem to be peering through a glass floor at the scene I only just witnessed: my sister and that girl, looking to each other as though catching a light.

This is the way we go to school, go to school, go to school, this is the way we go to school, on a cold and frosty morning. On the playground there are brown and red leaves blowing all about in a wind that would be brown and red if it could. A storm is coming . . . The bell has rung only minutes ago and I am in high spirits today, for I will get Alphonse her favourite sour keys and perhaps invite her to the attic. It has been much too long. I skip all the way down Evia Avenue, the cornerstore in sight, whistling and practicing my tables, although I do not think rules can be applied to those slippery digits. I see them often in the air and they agree. Rhymes are for destroying, I say to them, and you are for remembering. Numbers are memories: they balance the words of my sister and tear whole pages, I’ve heard, off such things as calendars and pop-up books and

Here.

Again, like messy handwriting:

The Girl.

        Outside the furniture store with her hair all frizzle and mad and her freckles that seem to have multiplied since the ghoulish morning. A ring around her eye, A Patch Of Devilry, Grandmother would say, that goes well with her usual lines of safety pins. Perhaps she is a giant magnet, I think.

In order to reach the cornerstore I must pass Lucy Sunday outside her father’s shop. I do not like thee, Doctor Fell; the reason why I cannot tell. As I inch closer she says hello, her hands on her hips, blowing pink bubbles. She says, I thought you were a space warrior.

Why, I ask, chewing the inside of my cheek as she pops her gum.

You know. Your UFO. The brown one.

I don’t say anything. She grins, her teeth crooked like her cocked head.

But I see now you’re more like a fingerpainting. So colourful, though a bit messier than space. Why so shy of me, Monty?

Laughing, she reaches out her freckled hand. I look at it, but I cannot move my own. I say I am a tree. A tree growing and who will one day have a hundred million roots, ninety-nine branches, a tallness surpassing hers. Lucy’s eyebrows rise with glee and there comes a chuckling sound in her throat.

We are akin you and I, Montgomery Plantagenet. How ‘bout it? A truce?

I narrow my gaze towards her before I turn around skipping -- one onehundred two onehundred three. Did the rhyme work? Skipping, skipping, away from the furniture store, past the cornerstore, candyless, counting. Is she tricking me, trying to beat me? Down Sixth and over to Cedrik – six onehundred seven onehundred eight onehundred – skipping, skipping. Can trees be vanquished? – but then, I have always known: Lucy is a bird – nine onehundred ten onehundred – and there’s no competing against wings.

Perhaps you are stopping now and wondering why anybody would ever bother telling any-other-body about eggshells and mute Pete and will o' the wisps or backwards in a rhyme. Perhaps you are wondering why I am telling you this memory at all or whether or not you'll get the things in the memory mixed up like I sometimes do when I think of lemon hurricanes and corpse ships and all the bright things in the world that are some concern to Alphonse. But the fact is it’s too late to wonder, for we, you and I, are far from being strangers now: you know things about me and about my sister that maybe no one else knows, and this is important since we have reached the part of my tale that most troubles me to tell. It is here that I arrive home and the sky is black like only it can be and I have skipped the distance all the way from the corner store despite the heavy thoughts that Lucy Sunday conjures around me like sprites decked out in sour honey. It is here that I do not see Alphonse in the front window, that I go down by the river to be by myself despite the sky and the wind and the downpour.  

Here,

holes.

What I see here are holes and they are dug into the ground, holes every which where exposing pieces of matchbooks, morsels of napkins,

letters,

pages of old books,

scattered around the wet dirt. All my rhymes,

retched into the mud, destroyed.

Reversed.

I close my eyes and count to nine and a half (precisely my age) before I look to the treepatch. There. A flash of white disappearing with blackened paws into the nearby shrubs. Oh Pete, why? But that is not yet the worst of it for I see Alphonse turn and look at me and in her hand is a piece of her own tweed skirt and on her lips are the words go see and in her eyes is this picture I behold and bring to you:

She is knee deep in the river like she has never been privy to land at all, the tops of her violet argyle socks just barely peering above the water, waving goodbye. This is not the way it was supposed to be. Alphonse was meant to stay, everything else was meant to go.

I am leaving now, Montgomery. The light is just a little ways down the river, I saw it from the window, I see it now. It came back for me Mont, the luminous ball, it came for me like I knew it would.

Luminous ball, it sighs from her mouth in a slow secret, peeling the story from every word she has spoken before it; every shrub and ripple, every darkening cloud she has queried was only scenery to cup luminous ball in a narrow corridor it now burns and passes through. I shake her words from my head for I do not wish to know them. I want to gather all luminous balls on earth and devise for them such sharp rhymes that not one is left intact, I want to but there are none that I can find. There is no ball but the circle of Alphonse’s mouth. No luminous but Alphonse’s solitary reflection on the cold, crumpling water.

Lucy is coming with me. We’re leaving town once we’ve caught the light, I wanted you to know, Monty. I’m telling you now.

I see her face is sad but calm so calm I cannot move. I feel the space from her to myself is as large as the silence counted by hundreds between her stories. Seventy-one, Eleven, Eighty-eight, Nineteen. Once, not so long ago for there is no such thing as long ago, I asked Alphonse what the centre of the earth was like and she answered, after a big thought, that it was like a black aurora, curling her hand around the air like she was holding the small and empty earth in the centre of her palm. I want to tell her now: I know it is not true for a light cannot be black, but even as I have the words in my mouth I wonder if she is not caught in the dark zenith of the earth’s core. I want to tell her now: that an aurora cannot have threads, a sky cannot go missing, and there is: there is: no luminous ball, there never was, not ever, only stories there were and stories are not real.

I look sideways of her black hair, bright black eyes. Black sky. I look as far as I can see. No light.

Her head tilts and she is gone. My sister. I stumble into the river after her, Alphonse, what light? Alphonse, I don’t remember, but the water slips me through its tricky fingers and its jagged rocks trip me towards the taste of deep earth. My face on the riverbank. Out.

Oh where oh where could Pussycat be?

When I awake the wind is humming and I hear the voice of Grandmother calling the names of Montgomery Percy and Alphonse Penelope and this too sounds so like humming that I cannot remember if the voices of Grandmother and Wind have ever had separate larynxes at all. I look down the river to see if my sister is there but all I see are leaves on the water, black sky and dirt carried by wind. Shingles from our roof, all around. What is a word that rhymes with thunder. Lightning smacks the sky in a plain streak, one onehundred two onehundred and another just like the last, not tubular, not ribbon, not silent or dark.

Here is the last image of Alphonse Penelope, crooked head and all: long black hair hanging in wet strings around her, calm-like and open as riverbed rock, following the river like a pathway around a bend I will never look beyond. It took her. It might take Lucy Sunday. That is all it needs. And that is how it is.

I once told Grandmother that if she had needs to call me, to call me in numbers, words’ perfect rhyme. Flashing details in a prickly emerald riverbed. She said, Queer Little Boy, You Do Not Understand The Logic Of Arithmetic. And they have always called me Montgomery Percy Plantagenet. For they do not know any better.

One Alphonse two Alphonse, six in a row. I cannot remember when it was not so.

Sandra Huber is a Canadian poet living, writing and teaching in Vienna, Austria.